Guest Blogger

Some excellent news comes via Todd Brown at Twitch, who is reporting that there is a forthcoming biopic of Falco. You know the dude who sang 'Rock Me Amadeus' and then kinda disappeared? The movie is bound to be essential viewing, I think you'll agree, at least based on the trailers.

Writing on the new Werner Herzog movie Encounters at the End of the World at The House Next Door, Vadim Rizov engagingly ponders the film and notes that "Like Balzac or Lars von Trier, he's the final authority on the world around him, even when it's a self-created one." (For a chat with Herzog, you can also trot over here…)

Jonathan Rosenbaum is putting up great articles weekly on his new website, and the latest is a long essay on John Cassavetes, appearing in English for the first time.

Cinematical — who have revealed a spiffy new redesign just a few days ago — were puzzled by the announcement of Eric Bana in the new Judd Apatow movie, Funny People. That is, until they found this video…

SpoutBlog is always worth regular visit, and this week highlights include Karina Longworth begging "please, please, let Madonna make a (probably doomed, but noble!) attempt to recapture her floridly, gloriously shallow Truth or Dare era glory days by once again leaving a movie-making husband and forcing a no-name filmmaker to shape her everyday life into mall-grade Fellini!" Also, Christopher Campbell tracks down a Star Wars dance-off.

At All These Wonderful Things, A. J. Schnack finds himself still mired in questions about his reporting of THINKFilm's decline. In the post POV's Tom Roston & THINKFilm's Mark Urman Criticize the Big Blogger-Media-Complex, Schnack replays (and counters) a post by P.O.V.'s Tom Roston, who in turn responds with a peace offering: "I was really addressing a larger blogosphere issue, which, yes, I'd like to playfully refer to as the blog-media-complex, and how feeding frenzies of half-truths can become wholes."

Andrew O'Hehir (Beyond the Multiplex) returns from vacation ready to get back to work…well, sort of: "I'm back. But instead of paying attention to the mountain of new releases facing me this week, or the surprising box-office success of Sergei Bodrov's Genghis Khan epic Mongol, countering the tsunami-like summer hits Iron Man, Kung Fu Panda and Sex and the City, let's consider an irrelevant pseudo scandal." So he begins his post Clint vs. Spike: WWII racial grudge match!

Danny Leigh of London's Guardian Blog looked to America for new blog controversies. This week the inadvertent use — or was it? — of Rip Torn's mugshot caught his bleary eye. In Cincinnati, councilor Chris Monzel used Torn's face to illustrate the threat of violent criminals and sexual predator in his campaign ads. Why not just a healthy fear of character actors?

Scott Von Doviak (on Screengrab.com) extends the debate on the fate of film critics, or as he puts it, "another lamentation over the position of the modern film critic — otherwise known as the unemployment line." Interestingly the item that drew the most attention from other bloggers was former Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson's comment on his blog Zero for Conduct: "The existence of full-time staff film reviewers is a nutty aberration in the history of periodical publishing… I'd love to see every magazine employ an army of full-time culture reviewers, and pay them millions, but it doesn't make very much sense, for the simple reason that it's not truly a full-time job." And he should know; it used to be his full time job.